Champagne and Gold

I’m really pleased to say that Pink Champagne and Apple Juice is now available with its brand-new cover at Lulu Books. It should fairly shortly be available at Amazon and other online book stores too, so I’ll let you know when that happens.

In the meantime, I’m also very happy to say that Salt and Gold – which is a collection of the first forty of my meditation poems – is now available at Amazon US as well as at Lulu Books. Ideal Christmas presents for all the family indeed …

I’ve also finished the final read-through of Thorn in the Flesh, ready for Lulu Books, but I’ll worry about that when we’re back from our holiday, I think. No point getting over-excited now.

Other news for these last few days is that Lord H and I thoroughly enjoyed a wonderful production of Jenufa at Woking last night. It’s a veritable plum of an opera, and includes dead babies, domestic violence, murder, love, hate and an incredible scene of forgiveness and hope at the end which gets me every single time I see it. Plus it has the dream role of Laca, the unloved brother who’s in love with Jenufa and has this astonishing journey of growth and maturity to take during the performance. He’s the man in the photo in the link. He was bloody good in the role, I must say too. Wonderful. Honestly, I could see that opera every single day and there’d always be something gut-punchingly good about it.

The only problem was attempting to get out of the car park in Woking afterwards. They have this new system that means you can prepay so you don’t have to queue with a million other opera-goers after the performance to get your ticket stamped. We’ve done this once before with no problems, but what we hadn’t realised is that there are 2 pay bands depending on whether you get there before or after 7pm. It doesn’t say anything on the machines about this, dammit, and neither does it give you a choice of payment. So, you’ve guessed it – we arrived before 7pm, and then at the barriers at 10.30pm the bloody things wouldn’t let us out. There were about 12 cars behind us getting angrier and angrier, but nowhere to reverse to as there were no gaps. Groan. Added to this the fact that we were in 2 cars, so once we’d contacted the little man at the end of the Help button and persuaded him to let Lord H out, we then had to go through the whole ruddy rigmarole again in order for me to make my escape. I swear, I was within seconds of being torn limb from limb by angry car parkers. It puts poor Jenufa’s problems entirely into perspective, though of course I would have been more than happy to throw a few dead babies into the baying crowds to fend them off, I can tell you …

Oh, and some lovely person has knocked my driver’s side wing mirror console off – though thankfully the glass is still intact, so that’s another job to do for after the hols. £100 is what it’s going to cost me – hell, I’m in the wrong business for sure. So currently, I have a car with a limp, poor thing. But hey ho and never mind – Lord H and I will be at the Westleton Crown in Suffolk for the next few days, so frankly my dears, right now, I don’t give a damn. Bring on the rain and the birds! Hope you all have a fabulous weekend.